With above 65 million users in just the United States within a week of launch, the augmented reality game from Japan’s Nintendo has broken all the records. Pokémon Go is the talk of the town among people of all the ages and has rocketed to the top of play stores in Apple and Android apps. Based on the theme of the game, where players have to walk around real-life locations to find virtual cartoon characters on their mobile phone’s screens, businesses have planned to use it as a marketing tool.
The craze and the potential of the app have reached so high that marketers have already started it calling a killer app for location based marketing. Malls and offline businesses are also eyeing on the app to leverage its popularity for their benefit.
For now, the game developer Niantic are monetizing the app through in-purchase and further planning to create in-game sponsorship opportunities. If you are also impressed by this marketing opportunity and planning to invest in Pokémon Go marketing, you should first understand the clear outlook of the state of in-game advertising in India.
In this digital world, in-game advertising has emerged as one of the most effective marketing channels for the brands looking for innovative ways to draw the attention of consumers at different platforms. This is one of the smallest yet the fastest growing segments in gaming with expected revenue of $4.75bn by 2019.
Video game market in India, which was valued at US$450mn in 2013, is also anticipated to grow by US$ 972mn by 2018. As per the PwC analyst forecasts, youth spends most of their time with mobile apps and brands like PepsiCo, Mondelez and Boost are perfectly harnessing this. These brands are getting more involved with the customers by reaching out to them on these mobile-gaming platforms.
Not just the animated games on imaginary characters but real life games on different movies are also getting immense popularity in India. Film-makers have also launched games on different movies like Sultan, Baby, Mission Impossible and Fan, among others.
What brands look for
Every brand invests in in-game marketing only when it is gaining something. There might be a difference in their objectives, but this is sure that they have some objective like to get increased consumer reach or to introduce some new product or services through in-game marketing.
When asked about global evolution of the in-game advertising, Gopa Kumar, Vice President, Isobar India, said, “Globally, gaming and in-game advertising are huge, and it has matured to quite an advanced level, to kind of integrations and creation of games for brands, the investments are huge and the execution for the same is also altogether in different level. We, as a market, are as of now at a very nascent stage compared to that. Globally, US, UK, China, and Japan are the largest markets for in-game advertising, thanks to their advanced ad ecosystems and large potential audiences.”
Adoption of Pokémon Go for in-game marketing
It is clear that India is still at the infant stage of in-game advertising by the brands. Though Pokémon Go shows them big dreams with huge promises for offline businesses without big brand names, it will be a challenging task to get the maximum ROI.
It will be interesting to see, how the brands exploit the power of this new game. Do you have some plans to capitalize this Pokémon craze at the advertising front? Don’t forget to share your thoughts with us through comments.
